How to Get Super Bowl Tickets

It should be clear at this point that getting Super Bowl tickets at face value or less is incredibly difficult. The only real option for most Super Bowl ticket buyers is to buy them online on the secondary or resale market.

Online ticket resellers like StubHub and SeatGeek work by connecting Super Bowl ticket buyers with ticket holders who want to sell. Those sellers may be individual season ticket holders who won their team's lottery or professional ticket brokers. The website makes money by taking a cut of the sales price and sometimes charging fees.

Pricing on the secondary market is pure supply and demand. Ticket prices go up or down based on the number of tickets available and how many people want to buy them. For example, when it looked like the Minnesota Vikings might play in the Super Bowl -- becoming the first team ever to play the big game on its home field -- eager Vikings' fans caused ticket prices on the secondary market to spike before the home team lost to the Eagles [source: Roberts].

Even without the Vikings, expect to pay dearly for secondhand Super Bowl tickets. The average resale ticket price for the 2017 game between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons was nearly $6,000 [source: Meyersohn]. As of this writing, the very cheapest resale ticket on SeatGeek is $3,793 and the cheapest seats listed on StubHub go for $3,240 a piece (bring your binoculars, though).

There's also a third option for deep-pocketed fans who want to lock in their Super Bowl tickets early. Announced back in 2016, the NFL has partnered with a third-party company to offer something called the NFL On Location Experience. Up to eight months before the big game, fans can buy high-end Super Bowl packages that include cheering players as they run out of the tunnel to celebrating with the winning team on field after the game [source: Rovell].

So yes, it's difficult and expensive to get tickets to the big game, but certainly not impossible. You can find lots more information about the Super Bowl and football on the next page.

When to Buy?

In an interesting twist, Super Bowl ticket prices on the secondary market historically get lower as game day approaches. That said, you don't necessarily want to wait till the last minute. The other costs of travel -- like airplane tickets and hotel rooms -- go up dramatically the closer you get to game day.